Double-Take

Double-Take: Reflections on Two Collections of South African Double-Exposure Portrait Photographs

by Michael Godby

A curiosity in The Other Camera archive in the University of Cape Town Libraries is the album of the Durban street photographer ‘Lucky’ Sipho Khoza, made in the years around 1990, that features a collection of 87 double-exposure portraits and 27 conventional ‘straight’ portrait photographs. Although only three of the double-exposure portraits feature in The Other Camera exhibition, it is worth pausing briefly on this collection as a rare preserved example of an extraordinary photographic practice.

Double-exposure, or double-image portrait photography is that form of the genre in which a newly-taken image of the portrait subject is inserted into a pre-existing image, usually a greetings card or a post-card, from a selection of images the photographer has on hand. The skill in this form of portrait representation lies chiefly in the technical ability of the practitioner to insert the new image more or less seamlessly into the chosen background scene. The interest in this form of the genre, on the other hand, lies mainly in the iconography of the completed image and the extraordinary range of reference that is available to portrait subjects. While the client was usually responsible for the choice of the background image, and so aware of his or her own intentions in making this choice, the portraits both individually and as a collection undoubtedly have a broader cultural significance.

The Sipho Khoza collection has not been published before and is only gradually entering the public domain through The Other Camera archive. Similarly, a second collection of double-exposure portrait photography by the Johannesburg-based photographer, David Selepe, has had little exposure in the academic world: some of the collection was presented at the ACASA conference in New Orleans in 1998, but the photographer was not actually identified and the research was not published.[1] In effect this collection has been known over the past twenty-odd years only to a few University of Cape Town academics – and their students in African Portraiture courses. It is worth introducing these two collections together, both for their similarity in technique and for their several apparent differences in clientele and iconography. But if nothing has been written on double-exposure portrait photography in South Africa and elsewhere, there is an amount of literature on informal street photography that may help in providing a context for this unusual phenomenon.

The ‘Lucky’ Sipho Khoza collection was preserved originally by the Durban-based photographer, Garth Walker. Walker writes that he obtained the collection during his researches in the mid-1990s into ‘visual street culture’, by which time, he says, many of the studios were already gone and forgotten.[2] Khoza himself had apparently vanished some time before Walker acquired the collection, leading him to date the work to “the late 80s/early 90s – perhaps earlier”. Character witnesses indicated that Khoza was “a bit of a charmer” – a quality that Santu Mofokeng writes was necessary to the profession of a street photographer[3] – as well as “a bit of a tsotse” – a role that may have led to his disappearing: Walker was told cryptically that “’Lucky’ is no longer lucky”. Alternatively, Khoza, who appears to have been supplied with high-end equipment by Naresh Modi, the major photography dealer in the Grey Street area of Durban in those years, may have suffered the same fate of AIDS as all Modi’s other street photographer clients at that time. Either way, we will see that the profession of street photographer in South Africa was, and remains, both precarious and transient.

The case of David Selepe is rather more complicated. His double-image work was collected in the late-1990s which suggests that this part of his career was pretty much contemporary to Sipho Khoza’s work: the only internal evidence to indicate chronology directly is the portrait that uses the Ellis Park Stadium during the Rugby World Cup of 1995 as a backdrop. This image, and several others, also indicates that Selepe worked in Johannesburg. Ten years later in 2005, in her account of street photographers in Johannesburg circa Now, Terry Kurganlocated David Selepe at a work station on the fountain circle in Joubert Park.[4] By that time, however, Selepe, like many other photographers in the Park, was working in digital and producing ‘straight’ portraits, three of which Kurgan reproduces, and there is absolutely no indication then, or in 2013, that he ever took double-exposure photographs. In a recent conversation, however, Selepe not only confirmed that he did indeed work with double-exposure in the 1980s and 90s but also that he was the only photographer in the Park working in this technique at that time.[5]

The collection of Joubert Park portraits made by Terry Kurgan for her exhibition in the adjacent Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004 comprised commissioned photographs for which a deposit had been paid but which were never collected in the event.[6] The origins of the two collections of double-exposure photographs are demonstrably quite different. The appearance of the same sitter against different backgrounds in both collections confirms that they were used as portfolios to show clients the effects of different settings: Sipho Khoza’s photographs were actually collected in an album that clients would peruse to consider different possible combinations. It is likely that their origin as demonstration images contributed to the considerable variety in iconography in these two collections of portrait photographs, and that the differences between the two collections reflected the different tastes and needs of their respective clienteles.

The historical moment of the double-exposure portrait photograph in Africa coincides with the proliferation of colour photography until the advent of digital photography – that is from the 1980s to the first decade of the present century:[7] David Selepe is very clear that it was this technical innovation that caused him to abandon the double-exposure method and change to ‘straight’ portrait photography. This was the period, of course, of the greatest invention in African portraiture as practitioners competed with each other to create the most memorable images. In West, Central, East and Southern Africa, photographers pushed the boundaries of conventional portrait photography in the invention of painted backdrops, the deployment of studio props, the elaboration of performative poses, and the creation of bizarre worlds inside the studio walls. Double-exposure photography was a part of this burst of creativity and shared both formal and iconographic concerns with this movement.

In his seminal essay, “Photography and the Substance of the Image” (1996), Olu Oguibe differentiated African photography – largely portrait photography – from European precedent by suggesting that while Western photography generally aspired to a condition of transparency, African practice tends to emphasize the material surface of the image over the illusion of spatial depth and use the medium as one amongst other forms of representation.[8] This recognition of the fictive quality of the medium, Oguibe continues, allows the practitioner – and the portrait subject – to combine the portrait image with any number of other forms that may collectively contribute meaning to the subject. In the example of the Likoni Ferry photographers of 1995-96 that were published by Heike Behrend, portraits comprise not only subjects that directly address the spectator in one way or another, but also an extraordinary amalgam of background scenery that contributes important information to the occasion of the photograph.[9] Thus portrait subjects, who are generally identified as migrants to the city requiring images of themselves to send to their families back home, might hold out bank notes, as an obvious indication of prospering, or they might engage with others in some fictive karaoke, or they might simply appear to celebrate friendship with one another. Verbal background signs might place the occasion at Christmas or New Year, and locate it at Mombasa – for the instruction of distant viewers. And painted backdrops might allude to ‘modernity’ – another version of prospering by association – in the form of airplanes or simply the Stars-and-Stripes of the American flag. The less articulate background imagery – animal forms, or Leonardo’s Last Supper, for example – and the plethora of plastic flowers and balloons, contribute a more or less festive sense to the overall spectacular quality of the image. These portraits obviously do not represent reality, as such, especially not the ideal reality of so much Western portraiture. They work as collages for subjects and spectators, on the one hand, to construct meaning through the addition of the separate parts, but also, on the other, to be impressed by an overwhelming composite image of sheer spectacle.

Invention and fantasy are important elements of much African portrait photography. For example, African studios took over the painted backdrops of Western portrait photographers and transformed the bland locus amoenus – or pleasant place – into a visually powerful element of their work. With the introduction of colour photography, these backgrounds could contribute chromatic power to the image that would effectively energize the portrait. But they could also provide a sense of spectacle in the dramatic nature of the landscape, such as waterfalls or mountain peaks. Moreover, these backgrounds could suggest specific locations where the portrait subject is to be imagined, thus inviting the spectator to believe the subject to have travelled – and to have the means to have travelled – to various exotic venues. David Southwood’s record of the painted backdrops of certain Khayelitsha portrait studios shows the choices available to the photographers’ clients – and the visual excitement inherent in any of these imagined travel choices [Figures X-Z].[10]

African portrait photographers also took over the idea of studio props and attributes from their European counterparts, and the painters that preceded them. As with the landscape backgrounds, even black-and-white African photographers, such as Seydou Keita, were not constrained by conventions of decorum and were able to have these props – from fashion accessories to motor cars - play major roles in their portrait images. In South Africa, Ronald Ngilima and others filled their portraits with the material signs of modern middle-class life [Figures P-Q].[11] In all these cases, the photographers seemed to have recognized that the very occasion of the photograph represented moments of aspiration for their clients that they could best meet by providing material form to these desires. It is not always clear whether the props in Seydou Keita or Ronald Ngilima, and others, belong to the client or to the photographer, nor, really, does it matter: the important point is that both photographer and client decided to feature these items as a means of signaling the status – or the aspiration to status – of the sitter. In a way, this gap between the real and illusory is intensified when the objects of desire are themselves not actually real as in the painted backdrops that became increasingly popular as colour photography took hold. The Ghanaian photographer, Philip Kwame Apagya, talks about his backdrops of kitchens, room-dividers, etc., as if they were real when, in fact, they are not at all convincing illusionistically:[12] in the fantasy world of desire, it would seem, both client and spectator are prepared to willingly suspend disbelief in the consumerist fictions in which they immerse themselves.

Part of Apagya’s rhetoric in his images is to have his clients perform for the camera. This aspect of portrait photography was also taken over from European precedent but vastly exaggerated in the African context.[13] Where European studio photographers would have a client perform his education, for example, by looking casually at a book, or a husband perform his attachment to his wife by resting his hand on her shoulder, African sitters are made to perform in very much stronger terms. Thus, as Steven Sprague has shown, male Yoruba sitters studiously perform identities that, while clearly depending on early European prototypes, effectively turn living individuals into ideal social constructions; and the few female sitters in Sprague’s sample represent themselves willingly as prospective hand-maidens to future husbands.[14] Apagya himself has his sitters fully enter the fiction of, perhaps, travelling to Mecca represented by the Kaaba in the painted backdrop; or reaching towards a – painted – well-stocked refrigerator for a cold drink; or – if female – take a mop and appear to clean the floor of ‘Auntie Monica’s (well-furnished) Bathroom’.[15] In Apagya and other photographers, the performance often starts outside the studio: in interviews Apagya states that the Ghanaian ‘Aye’ ceremony in which young women mark their arrival at marriageable age by certain forms of dress and ornament for their clothes and hair is today unimaginable without photography. In fact, Apagya regards young women as his principal client base because of their constant desire to appear attractive to men which causes them to regularly buy new clothes and then to commemorate these purchases by having their photograph taken. Obviously, vanity is a regular motivation for portrait photography, amongst men as well as women, in South Africa as well as West Africa. But throughout Africa, it appears to be women, rather than men, who use photography to present themselves as attractive to the opposite sex.

Inevitably, perhaps, these general comments on the form of African portrait photography – or, as Heike Behrend and Jean-Francois Werner, noting the great range of practice on the continent, suggest ‘African photographies’[16] – have touched on the notion of meaning, both for the subjects themselves and in cultural terms: we will return to this theme in a moment. Before fully engaging with the iconography of double-exposure photography, it is important to note that while the technique shares much of the formal values of African portrait photography, it is in fact unique – or nearly so. Double-exposure photography itself has not actually been studied, but Heike Behrend has written on two Ugandan photographers, Ronnie Okocha Kauma and Afanaduula Sadala, who around the turn of the millennium were producing photo collages that seemed to place their portrait subjects into invented situations.[17] The photographers would cut out photographs from magazines and other media of both places and celebrities and create a collage world in which their photograph of the portrait subject would be inserted. The arrangement would then be re-photographed and offered to the client, who would often be an active participant in the arrangement, as an ideal image of themselves. As Behrend writes, these photographers (like many African photographers) “turned photography into a wish-fulfilling machine”.[18] Portrait subjects could consort with kings and presidents; they could make their appearance at international airports; and they could turn themselves into fierce soldiers, famous football-players and, even, a bishop in full regalia. However, the compositions are not simply the insertion of the sitter – or his or her head – into a pre-existing location: the entire mise-en-scene is a collage that brings into play its own constituent parts – its swimming-pools, Christmas wishes, etc. - in the reading of the scene. Behrend cites the critical literature on collage that treats it as the quintessential medium of modernism, that moment “when modernity turned its gaze upon itself and attempted to attain a self-awareness which would eventually disclose its impossibility” but, in truth, the photographers’ statements on their practice and their clients indicate no such anxiety:[19] the portrait subject simply gained status by being imaged, for example, in conversation with the nation’s president, or inside a luxury resort. As for the fractured backgrounds that incorporate several incompatible spaces, it is clear that these do represent, as Behrend argues, hybrid constructions that locate significant aspects of the global – modernity, mobility and consumerism – in local situations.

Collage is also the aesthetic principle of double-exposure photography. The main difference between the photographs of Sipho Khoza and David Selepe and these Ugandan photographers is that, for the most part, their method is simply to insert the portrait image into a unitary pre-existing scene rather than a more or less complex spatial construction. In both practices, as Ronnie Okocha Kauma explained, the combination of images is re-photographed in order to transform the image into a “real photograph”. The collage ideas of juxtaposition, association, and invented realities are common to both South African and Ugandan examples. And, not surprisingly, given the general historical coincidence of the two practices, both sets of photographs deal largely with aspirations to some form of modernity in Africa.

Recent treatments of street photography in South Africa have centred around the extraordinary Joubert Park project and the Johannesburg circa Now publication directed by Terry Kurgan and Jo Ractliffe in 2005.[20] The date and the place of this investigation are significant because the project clearly responded to the massive demographic transformations that were occurring in that area at that time. In a related publication, Louise Bethlehem and Terry Kurgan quote a 2003 survey that reports the fact that 68% of the inhabitants of inner city Johannesburg had moved there within the past five years; and that 25% were born outside South Africa.[21] Aware of the scale of these migrations, and undoubtedly affected also by the tragic outbreaks of xenophobic violence, researchers have tended to look at the present phenomenon of Joubert Park photography as efforts on the part of an uncertain population to secure their identity within the city, as Kwame Anthony Appiah might argue, or, in light of Michel de Certeau’s theories, as representing some sort of physical progression through the city.[22] These perspectives are certainly plausible but they do not preclude more mundane motivations for the commissioning of portrait photographs and they might not apply at all to an earlier generation of portrait subjects. The career of David Selepe makes clear that the nature of street photography in Joubert Park has changed radically in the decades that he has been working there, certainly in the example of his abandonment of double-exposure photography in favour of digital equipment but also, one can argue, in reflecting the changing concerns of different generations of customers.

Louise Bethlehem and Terry Kurgan, drawing on Roland Barthes’ understanding of a photograph as the “advent of myself as other”, write that “To commission a photograph of the self is always to attest to a selfhood suspended in the dense solvent of sociality”.[23] And, in relation to current Joubert Park portrait photographs, Ruth Rosengarten writes that a photograph is a depiction of “myself not (only) as I would like to see myself, but as I am in turn seen, as I am perceived by the cultural gaze”.[24] In theory, this “dense solvent of sociality” can range from shared patterns of consumption to a population united in political action. But while there is always an assertion of individual identity in any portrait – a resonant claim that “This is me!” - the significance of double-exposure photography two decades ago is fundamentally limited by the choice of the background image of the portrait. In the huge majority of Sipho Khoza’s work, for example, the cultural significance of the image is contained within the mawkish sentimentality of Hallmark greeting cards. Heike Behrend argues that young people in Nairobi in the 1990s used African-American hip-hop culture to resist repressive patriarchal government based on ethnicity and tradition – and circulate photographs of their dress and their dance-moves as tacit statements of protest.[25] But Khoza’s version of “transcultural, global subjectivity” is so utterly banal that it is not possible to find in it either a political or, even, a personal dimension. Where, one might ask, is the sense of individuation in Khoza’s insertion of head-and-shoulder portraits into Valentine’s Day cards with their cliched iconography of roses, red hearts and tinsel [Figure 1: For my Sweetheart]? Or For Somebody Special? Or the cheesecake Birthday cards for different ages? A more personal note is apparent in the clearly hand-written messages that Khoza inserts along with the portrait in some cards but, in fact, the italic script indicates that these legends are simply mimicking – probably even copying – standard greeting card texts. There is creativity of a kind also in Khoza’s appropriation of images and his application of them to new uses. For example, there are many portraits in the album that put Christmas iconography – a decorated tree in front of a blazing fire-place – to more general use but, again, the overall message is of banal sentimentality [Figure 2: For you, Dear, I love you more than ever].

In his double-exposure portraits, Sipho Khoza traded on the popularity of commonplace greetings cards in the confidence that his customers would feel they could communicate their emotional needs through these ready-made sentiments. For the most part, this makes the Sipho Khoza archive, however technically proficient, somewhat depressing viewing. But we have seen that Khoza did exercise invention when he appropriated cards made for different occasions. And a few of his portrait photographs appear to be original inventions. One that incidentally confirms the popular base of his cultural reference is the portrait inserted into a television screen, a vehicle that probably suggests either celebrity or ‘soap operas’ [Figure 3]. Moreover, his portrait inside the Michael Jackson record cover Dangerous (1991) must have been genuinely arresting in its time [Figure 4]. And his card I found a World of Happiness When I Found You [Figure 5], that uses an image of the Earth in space as background to a head-and-shoulders portrait, is both inventive and interesting. In a discrete series, Khoza appears to have enjoyed applying his technical dexterity in a set of images that has the portrait head seamlessly inserted into a larger portrait figure: occasionally, the two portraits are of the same person [Figure 6], perhaps suggesting alternative moods as in some contemporary Indian portrait photography;[26] but at other times, a head-and-shoulder portrait is superimposed on a different background figure, setting up a relationship between them which, in the example of the small figure appearing inside the head of the larger one, might suggest that the one is in the other’s thoughts [Figure 7].

In some ways, Sipho Khoza’s album is as interesting for what it does not represent as much as for what it does. Clearly, the album has nothing to say on the theme of migrancy, or separated families: on the contrary, the ideal represented in the album is romance, on the one side, and family structures on the other, in a way that is not at all differentiated from the general market of the greetings cards to which the portrait photographs are applied. Khoza’s choice of backgrounds never references the actual physical environment and so there is no suggestion that his subjects have recently settled in the city or are in any way ill at ease in their surroundings. While a direct result of Khoza’s use a commercial greetings cards, this absence in the portraits may be explained by their date of around 1990 when, on the one hand, many African people had already moved into Durban and other cities in KwaZulu-Natal – as of right – and were turning their attention to more mundane matters; and, on the other, mass immigration, with its attendant xenophobia, was not yet an issue. More surprising, perhaps, in light of both West and East African examples, is the general lack of interest in the material form of consumer culture: a few portraits are floated against cold drink tins, but there is no whole-scale urge to possession – of televisions, refrigerators, room-dividers, etc., that is such a common feature of portrait photography elsewhere in the continent. Nor either, is there any claim to modernity – to urban values, mobility, and freedom. For some reason which cannot now be explained but which might possibly relate to his customer base and, perhaps, to the place where he practiced his craft, Sipho Khoza’s version of “transcultural, global subjectivity” is focused exclusively on the emotional life of his clients.

Surprisingly, the dozen or so surviving double-exposure portraits from David Selepe’s demonstration portfolio show a very much wider range of reference than the larger collection by Sipho Khoza. There are a few themes in common, such as the insertion of portraits into the insignia of Orlando Pirates and other popular football teams; and Selepe’s use of spectacular flower backgrounds – of strelitzia and proteas - for portraits of young women is similar to Khoza’s use of greeting cards with floral elements, although one might remark the specifically local, South African choice of flowers against the generically global form of roses on the cards [Figure 8]. Selepe differs from Khoza in that he generally used postcards as backdrops, as against Khoza’s preferred use of greeting cards, but there is one example of a 21st Birthday card and so it is possible that he originally had more greetings cards in stock. As a vehicle of communication, postcards are at once more open-ended than customized greeting cards and yet more insistent on the spectacular aspect of their content: strelitzias and proteas are not just beautiful, they are strikingly beautiful and this is the association that is required to be made with the portrait subject. This idea of the spectacular probably also explains the choice of a highly-decorated Byzantine Madonna and Child image as setting for a portrait, rather than any more precise association of a religious or ritual nature.

The evacuation of meaning from a scene is familiar to all who have witnessed wedding photographs being taken in urban situations. In Cape Town, for example, Rhodes Memorial is a popular place for wedding photographs and one can be absolutely certain that this choice does not mean that the participants subscribe in any way to Cecil Rhodes’ legacy of British imperialism: all that is intended in choosing this backdrop is that some of the ideas of monumentality and significance inherent in the monument should be attached to the occasion that is being commemorated. The double-exposure photographer obviously has a much wider range of spectacular backgrounds to choose from – and the technical skill to make the association appear real. David Selepe offered his wedding couples many different choices from Johannesburg skylines to tourist images of lions – the imagined kings of the jungle. He also represented a bridal group in Ellis Park stadium in Johannesburg as the South African Airways Boeing flew overhead on the occasion of the Rugby World Cup in 1995 [Figure 9]: as with the example of Rhodes Memorial, this backdrop should be taken to indicate the significance of the occasion, rather than a specific interest in the tournament or the game.

Certain background postcards in David Selepe’s repertoire might have allowed for specific iconographic meaning as well as general spectacular significance. Thus, while the lions are probably read simply as regal creatures that lend their stature to the wedding occasion, the background of an elephant might, in certain traditions, combine this significance with particular totemic meaning. Similarly, a background of cattle is likely to involve the idea of bride-wealth, which may also feature in the wedding portrait of a couple set against a ten rand note, although this background, unusual in not being a postcard, might simply connote the desire for prosperity in the marriage [Figure 10]. Significantly, the most popular kind of background in Selepe’s collection is the cityscape which demands interpretation in modernist rather than traditional terms.

Selepe’s postcards of the city clearly represent his version of the common African theme of ‘modernity’ [Figure 11]. There is little suggestion of aesthetic value, or even the spectacular, in the Johannesburg skyline with its mine-dumps and highways. Rather these forms suggest wealth and mobility as aspects of urban life that attract the portrait subjects. As in much African studio photography, airplanes also are powerful signifiers of these aspects of modern urban life. It is through cities that African people can imagine themselves as part of the global community and partake in the benefits of the modern world. Thus single figures, 21st Birthday celebrants and wedding couples can all aspire to an ideal life represented in these views of the modern industrial city [Figure 12]. However, in the peculiar conditions in South Africa at the time these photographs were made, these aspirations were certainly accentuated by the experience of a new political freedom. For the subject that chose to be represented against the new South African flag, this image most likely represented more than just a spectacular backdrop: it would have signified some sort of celebration of identity in the new South African state. Similarly, the urban backdrops in several of the portraits must have been intended to communicate not only the aspirations to global modernity in common with portrait subjects elsewhere in Africa but also, at some level, the assertion of the political right to live and to prosper in the South African industrial capital.

More work remains to be done on double-exposure photography as on other aspects of South African street portraiture. There were certainly other photographers working at some time in Joubert Park, and doubtless elsewhere, in the double-exposure method who are waiting to be identified;[27] and many aspects regarding iconography, client reception, customer base, and so on, need to be researched.[28] But, for all its variety in quality, the work of Sipho Khoza and David Selepe may be celebrated as a peculiarly South African contribution to that extraordinary efflorescence of African portrait photography in colour before the onset of the digital era.

[1] Rory Bester, ‘At Home in the City’, a paper presented in the panel ‘African Studio Photography’ at the 11thTriennial Symposium on African Art, New Orleans, April 1998.

[2] Garth Walker, e-mail communication, November 2013: I am very grateful to Garth Walker for generously sharing information on the Sipho Khoza collection and generally supporting this project.

[5] Personal communication, December 2013. I am very grateful to David Selepe for discussing his earlier work with me and for giving permission to reproduce his photographs. John Makua, 76-77 in Brenton Maart and T.J. Lemon eds., Sharp: The Market Photography Workshop, Johannesburg: The Market Photography Workshop, 2002, describes the police harassment of photographers in Joubert Park, even after 1985.

[8] Olu Oguibe, ‘Photography and the Substance of the Image’, 231-250 in Clare Bell, Okwui Enwezor et al eds., In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996. See also Christopher Pinney, ‘Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism and Vernacular Modernism’, 202-220 in Pinney and Peterson eds., Photography’s Other Histories.

[10] Pam Warne, ‘The Studio Without’, 88-101 and 140 in A Decade of Democracy: South African Art from the Permanent Collection of Iziko: South African National Gallery, Cape Town: Iziko Museums of Cape Town, 2004.

[11] For Ronald Ngilima see Sophie Feyder, ‘Lounge Photography and the Politics of Township Interiors: The Representation of the Black South African Home in the Ngilima Photographic Collection, East Rand, 1950s’ , Kronos: South African Histories, 38, November 2012, 131-153.

[26] Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London: Reaktion Books, 1997.

[27] Terry Kurgan kindly told me that she came across double-exposure portrait photographers in her early visits to Joubert Park – after David Selepe had ceased this practice - and even had herself photographed by one: personal communication, December 2013.

[28] I hope to pursue these questions in conversations with David Selepe in 2014.